A Chance Encounter
by GrandOldPenguin
Summary: Marlene meets the penguins for the first time when she gets lost and accidentally stumbles into their habitat. The penguins first take the intruding otter captive, but Skipper soon sees Marlene for who she really is.


A month had passed since the penguins returned to the Central Park Zoo after their adventures in Madagascar, Africa, and other distant lands. Though the team had been back for weeks already, not much had been happening at the zoo lately. There were no missions to go on, no adventures to be had, no need to blow things up at random with dynamite; Skipper was beginning to believe that the hippies had won. So far, the biggest crisis of the past month was when Rico had gotten a paper cut while shuffling a deck of cards. Needless to say, boredom at this level did not sit well with a group of militarily trained penguins.

Having little reason to step outside their habitat, the penguins were unaware that while they had been away overseas, the zoo had acquired a new attraction: an otter from the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California.

Just like the penguins were trying to adjust to life without constant missions, the otter, a female by the name of Marlene, was still trying to adjust to life at a new zoo. Though she had been there for six weeks, it wasn't quite home yet, for she hadn't yet found any friends to talk to. So she instead spent most of her time setting up her habitat to her liking; if it had to be her new home, she wanted every square inch of it to be perfect.

"Ah, these flowers look so good here," Marlene said to herself as she put down the vase she was holding in one of the corners of her cave. "And they smell pretty, too."

As she was pulling away from the flowers after smelling them, something strange at the bottom of the wall in the corner caught her attention. Marlene thought that she knew the entire layout of her new habitat after spending six weeks in it, but there appeared to be some sort of door that blended in quite well with the rest of the wall, except for its hinges. Curious, Marlene crawled down on the floor and opened it. "That's a funny place for a tunnel," she said as she peeked inside.

Marlene didn't know it but she had just discovered an entrance to the penguins' secret network of tunnels that ran throughout the zoo. It was through these underground passageways that the penguins had escaped the zoo on their mission to reach Antarctica, phase 1 of which didn't go as planned when they were all captured at Grand Central Station.

At first, Marlene didn't know what to make of the tunnel, so she shut the door and stood back up. But her curiosity soon returned. After finding a lantern, she went back to the door and opened it. She then crawled into the entrance, hoping to find out where the tunnel went.

Although she had to crawl to get into it, the tunnel itself was high enough that she could walk comfortably inside. After a few minutes of trying to find where the tunnel led, however, Marlene concluded that there were just too many turnoffs and forks to other tunnels to know for sure, so she decided to return home. Unfortunately for her, she couldn't remember where she had last turned, and she quickly became lost in the labyrinth of passageways.

When Marlene came to a fork, she had to go either left or right. Little did she know that her decision to go right was about to change her life, first for the worst, then for the better. She was heading straight for the penguins' HQ.

"Um, hi," Marlene said embarrassingly as she crawled out of a doorway she thought led into her own habitat, finding penguins instead.

"Intruder!" Skipper shouted when he saw the unauthorized mammal in his barracks. He and his men then assumed their fight stance, the first time they had done so outside of training in quite some time.

"Who are you people?" Marlene asked as she observed their formation.

"We're not people, we're penguins—and darn fine ones at that!" Skipper replied as he broke formation a little.

"I should probably leave," Marlene said, not sure where the situation might be heading.

Skipper made a gesture with his flipper to Rico, who nodded at his leader's coded order and then waddled away. "This facility is now on lockdown, and no one leaves without my authorization!" Skipper declared.

Marlene, however, just ignored Skipper's declaration and began making her way back into the entrance of the tunnel. She didn't get very far before Rico captured her in a net.

Marlene's mood then turned from cautious to terrified, for she knew not what these strange birds might do to her. "What do you want with me?" she asked to whoever might listen.

"Spy!" Rico mumbled.

"I'm not a—" Marlene began to argue before she noticed that Rico had a gun in a holster around his waist, though she didn't know that it was just his trusty flamethrower.

Marlene began to realize that her captors were serious dudes, and she had no response other than to break down and cry. "Please! Please, for the love of God, let me go!" she begged through her tears. "I promise I'll go home and never come back here again! I'll forget about everything I ever saw here!"

"Things would be better if you'd just admit you're a spy," Private informed her.

"Let me go! I'm innocent! It's the truth—I swear I'm not a spy!"

"The odds argue to the contrary," Kowalski said as he pulled out his abacus and slid some of its beads around. "When you apply the laws of geometry and take into account your height as the hypotenuse if you were a right triangle and multiply it by the speed of light and then divide it by my secret rate of exponential decay, the odds are 89.6 percent that you are indeed a spy."

"They're wrong! I'm not a spy!" Marlene continued to plead. "I just got lost in the tunnels—I never wanted to come here! You have got to believe me!"

Skipper, after having been across the room for the duration so far, waddled over to join his men around their netted intruder. He soon turned to Kowalski. "That's an otter, isn't it?" he asked.

"Affirmative," Kowalski replied.

"Good. I think I can do it."

"Do what, sir?" Kowalski asked, but Skipper was too busy staring into Marlene's eyes to provide a response.

"What! What are you doing!" Marlene asked, still scared to death, as Skipper continued to gaze into her eyes.

"Kowalski's a good guy, but there are just some things that can't be analyzed with mathematics," Skipper told her.

"What's to analyze? I'm not a spy!"

"I know." He turned to Rico. "Rico, release her."

"But—" Rico began.

"Do it! No excuses!"

As Rico lifted up the net, Marlene and Skipper stood face to face with nothing between them. "Otter, you are free to go," Skipper told her. "But I'd prefer that you come with me into the tunnel you came out of so that I can talk to you about what just happened."

Marlene was still shaken up by the whole ordeal, but she felt that she had to listen to whatever Skipper wanted to tell her. He was, after all, the only one who knew she really wasn't a spy.

After getting a flashlight, Skipper led Marlene into the tunnel. A few moments passed, but he hadn't spoken yet. When he abruptly stopped, Marlene wondered why. When he suddenly reached his right flipper under his left, Marlene once again thought the worst. "I should have known!" she shouted as she shut her eyes and cried. "If you have any mercy, please make it quick."

"Make what quick?" Skipper asked.

"When my life ends. I know it's a gun you have, I just don't want to see it coming."

"You're kidding me, right? I've never killed anybody. Why don't you open your eyes and see what I really have. Come on, now."

Marlene decided that she might as well face whatever it was head on. She opened her eyes to find Skipper holding out some tissues.

"I figured that you might like to dry your eyes before we talked about what happened at the HQ," Skipper said as Marlene took the tissues from him. "I never would have thought holding them under my flipper like that would have scared you."

"Well, sorry for the drama," Marlene apologized.

"That's OK, you've been through a lot. I suppose a full explanation is needed."

Marlene nodded, albeit hesitantly, as she continued to wipe her tears with the tissues.

"First off," Skipper began, "you probably won't agree with me, but I believe that we had probable cause to initially take you captive. My men are good, but we have enemies, and enemies have spies. With your unexpected entrance into our HQ, what were we supposed to believe?"

"Fair enough, but I didn't want to intrude on anything," Marlene said. "I just got lost in those tunnels. It was an accident."

"There's no need to repeat yourself; I already know it was just a mistake, and that's why I ordered your release," Skipper said. "I'm sorry for the inconvenience and fear that we caused you, but do you mind if I ask how you got into the tunnels in the first place?"

"There was a doorway in my habitat. I was curious, so I crawled in to check it out."

Skipper chuckled slightly. "Yeah, I guess I never expected some other animal to actually want to explore them before."

"Did you build the tunnels?"

"Long, backbreaking months of work with my men. Yes. And you're the first non-penguin to know about them, so please keep quiet about their existence."

Marlene nodded.

"Well, that's pretty much it," Skipper said. "If you don't have any more questions, I'll try to get you back to whichever habitat you came from."

"Well, I do have one thing I would like to know if you could tell me," Marlene said. "I'm sorry if it's wrong to ask, but why were you the only one to believe me when I said that I wasn't a spy?"

"Your eyes," Skipper replied. "I saw the terror that you were feeling in them; I knew that you weren't lying about the spy thing. I've seen the eyes of the guilty; yours were the ones of innocence."

Marlene was intrigued. "You can really tell all that from someone's eyes alone?"

Skipper nodded. "It's just some kind of sixth sense. You should know."

"Know what?"

"I think you can do it, too."

"How can I possibly—"

"You want to try it? Just look into my eyes and tell me what you see."

Just as Skipper had been able to tell that Marlene was not a security threat by looking into her eyes, Marlene saw Skipper for who he really was by doing the same. As any lingering uncertainty about Skipper dissolved, Marlene knew that she had just made her first friend in New York.

"What do I see?" Marlene said. "Trust is at the top of the list."

"And I think kindness and fairness are at the top of yours," Skipper replied.

Marlene smiled at the compliment. "So, what's your name?"

"Classified J. Classified."

Marlene took a quick glance at Skipper's eyes as he gave her his _name_. "That's bogus!" she said, smiling confidently, as she knew the penguin she was with was no longer any threat to her. "You shouldn't have told me that I can do the 'eye-truth' thing if you didn't want me to use it."

Skipper couldn't help but smile and chuckle at Marlene's remark. "I like your style," he said. "Call me Skipper."

"Well, I'm Marlene," she replied, holding out a paw for Skipper to shake. "I just got here six weeks ago from California."

Skipper accepted Marlene's paw and shook it. "Welcome to New York, Marlene. I hope you'll come over and meet the boys for real sometime soon. You're invited this time, so there will be no net, I can assure you."

"Tell me about them. What do you guys do?"

"We do whatever is needed to be done; no job is too big or too small," Skipper replied. "And if you want to know about them, well, Kowalski is the tall one with the abacus—he's our strategist, scientist, and everything else we need a big IQ for. Rico—you know, the guy with the net—doesn't talk much, but he's our resident explosives and weapons expert. And Private handles special operations."

"And you lead them all?"

"It's the greatest job in the world."

Marlene sighed. "I'm sorry I thought you were going to kill me. You really seem like a nice guy. I bet you hear that all the time."

"No, not really."

"Then you're not getting enough credit, Skipper. Don't forget that I looked into your eyes. I can tell that you really are one of the good guys. You always want to do the right thing."

"Well, doing the right thing is part of the Penguin Code. Any penguins that do wrong are technically still penguins, but they aren't really worth their flippers."

"Well, I think doing the right thing is part of your own code, too," Marlene said. "I certainly think it was the right thing for you to explain to me about what happened at your HQ, and I thank you for taking the time to care. Truly, I thank you."

"You're welcome, Marlene," Skipper said. "Come on, I'll walk you home."

And so began a friendship.

* * *

Could this be the first tale in the Skilene saga? You be the judge.

[Story last revised May 10, 2013.]


End file.
